David Kolb: It may not be the U.S. who whacks North Korea

It’s not hard to read between the lines that China doesn’t like this situation one bit.

I have a hard time believing China isn’t going to whack North Korea, a routine plot point of the old “Sopranos” HBO series, which was terrific, by the way.

In many ways, the tragic farce being committed by the latter-day hermit kingdom does bear great similarity to the somewhat fictional events that affected Tony and the boys in New Jersey.

Most ominously, North Korea’s reckless bad behavior has been very bad for business in China’s neck of their shared Asian neighborhood.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, gestures while shaking hands with China's Premier Li Keqiang during a meeting at the Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing April 13, 2013. The question of how Washington can persuade Beijing to exert real pressure on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's unpredictable regime was front and center.AP FILE PHOTO

It is not without some trepidation that I write the above rather light-hearted lines.

Observing Americans wrangling with Americans over policy and politics has been entertaining; watching North Korea attempting to gin up a nuclear crisis with the West has been terrifying.

Should its impulse take it to war in some crazed, impulsive, suicidal moment, then the Korean peninsula would, at best, be set ablaze and locked into an agonizing struggle that will endure for however long it will take for South Korea and its allies to put down the war-mongering brother to the north.

But at worst, the North Koreans might have a few deadly nuclear tricks up their sleeve that would endanger tens of millions throughout Asia and the western Pacific. At additional risk would be our friends Japan and Singapore, plus U.S. assets and bases in the region, which house the Navy’s Seventh Fleet, the Air Force’s Thirty-Sixth Wing, the 497th Combat Training Squadron and the III Marine Expeditionary Force.

In the most exposed position is the U.S. Eighth Army, which has long been stationed in South Korea. American forces there are the proverbial “trip wire,” meaning their endangerment would be considered a direct act of war perpetrated by the aggressor nation.

True, North Korea has a long history of bluster and faking it to achieve varying degrees of attention and critical goods from its enemies, which number just about every sane nation in the world.

But the situation this time out has a somewhat different and more ominous feel to it. And it’s not hard to read between the lines that China doesn’t like it one bit.

China has been like a parent to North Korea since the latter split off from the south after World War II. The Chinese have nurtured the family of despots that have ruled it, supplied them militarily, and even came to their defense during the Korean War, which ended in 1953 in an unsatisfactory armistice.

While North Korea has hunkered down behind a barbed wire border, China has gone its own way, and spectacularly. By blending its peculiar communism with a form of capitalism on steroids, China stands on the verge of superpower status alongside the United States. The lives and fortunes of its billions of citizens are bound up in this social and economic experiment.

Were China to suddenly take the lead and swat North Korea, it would instantly vault to the center of the world stage, a hero nation to all the rest. Suddenly, the Korean peninsula would be a Chinese footpad onto the doorsteps of Japan. Chinese influence in Asia would surge as America’s waned.

North Korea’s madmen in their death-throes wouldn’t understand China’s turning on its own wayward step-child.

But as Tony Soprano might have said:

“It’s not personal. It’s business.”

David Kolb is former editorial page editor of The Muskegon Chronicle. Email: writersgroupllc@gmail.com